THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY
Susmita Dasgupta
The Birth of Tragedy is the name of a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, who postulated that the genesis of tragedy lies in society finding Dionysian values more appropriate than Apollonian values. The former are ‘dark’ values and the latter are ‘godlike’, something akin to our tamasik and satwik values. Of course, the nihilist philosopher that Nietzsche was, it is unlikely that he would have accepted that some values are tamasik and some satwik on an a priori basis. He merely said that when a society wanted to change, it accepted values that it had hitherto considered Dionysian. When that change had been established those values became Apollonian. The progress of Amitabh’s career from an anti-hero to the symbol of establishment and order is a similar process.
At the core of Amitabh Bachchan’s image—flowing like a subterranean text beneath the anger, rebellion and nihilism—is tragedy, one that appears to be anger but that often ends in selfabnegation rather than self-assertion. The seeds of this tragedy were contained in Zanjeer but became fully manifest in Deewar (1975) directed by Yash Chopra. Indeed, Deewar is the basic text of Amitabh Bachchan, and the image of the hero in subsequent films like Kabhi Kabhie (1976) and even Sholay (1975) may be said to be a dialogical engagement with Deewar’s hero. Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar wrote all these films (barring Kabhi Kabhie), and the questions and comments that arose from one film could easily find answers in the others. In any case, these films closely followed one another, and cross-referencing seems probable.
As in Zanjeer, the character Amitabh plays in Deewar is called Vijay, meaning victory. It turned out to be a lucky name for him and so it stuck. As Vijay, the victorious one, Amitabh plays a conqueror over and over again, signifying victory of good not merely over evil but over the system that produces the evil. We shall see how tragedy is essential to his conquests and how Hindi commercial cinema strategized the tragedy in order to achieve some specific ends. Like politics and religion, cinema, at least the melodramatic genres like Indian popular cinema and Hollywood, operates in the public sphere and in the realm of public consciousness. The age of Amitabh Bachchan was also the age of the end of innocence. People were no longer willing to take the values of the Nehruvian state and the freedom struggle for granted because the promised utopia never came. This was an age of general disillusionment with the existing patterns of social and political life. Popular Hindi cinema, through Amitabh’s image, was suggesting a whole new way of thinking about the situation. In this new way of thinking, the crisis was not merely a matter of people drifting away from ethics but the absence of new ideals and ethics to face new situations. Tragedy was a helpful tool for this purpose.
According to Iris Murdoch, tragedy informs us that the world is not a perfect place—it is fractured. Tragedy tells us that human suffering is due to the inherent contradictions in reality. The protagonist in a tragedy could die in an effort to make the world complete, but the contradictions remain, the reality is as fractured. This is what makes the death tragic. In Deewar too the hero dies but, because it is a tragedy, the death is transformed into visionary pain calling upon the consciousness of the audience to renew and regenerate the world. Deewar could not have shown us the need for reform and resurrection had it not been a tragedy. George Lukacs says that tragedy produces the polemical hero, one who sees the problematic and one whose basic movement is to purify. Deewar presented Amitabh as such a hero. Hence, his vision (through the prototype of Vijay) and the dialogues that articulated that vision became as important as his experiences. This made him a man for the new times that were to emerge.
Deewar’s tragedy is multiple. The hero’s father abandons the family and walks away. The mother and Vijay as a young boy have to earn a living on the streets in order to give the younger brother, Ravi, a life that is due to all of them. Ravi (Shashi Kapoor) is educated in a college and gets a policeman’s job and his life seems to be on the right track. Vijay, of course, is now a freer man and, with Ravi becoming capable of taking over the reins from him, he has only himself to look after. All is well till Vijay, who works as a coolie in a Mumbai dockyard, sees a fellow worker being killed by extortionists when he refuses to comply with their demands. The dead man was his family’s sole breadwinner. Suddenly, Vijay connects with him and this empathy enables him to raise his personal tragedy to a generalized tragedy afflicting society as a whole. He realizes society within himself and himself as society. Although empirically he can do nothing about it yet, conceptually he can see the solution to the problem. So he decides to take on the goons.
The scene where Vijay fights the goons in the closed warehouse is one of the best-composed fight scenes in Hindi cinema. Amitabh’s physical attributes—his height, the lean frame which lends his body a strange lightness, his tortured gaze which never loses eye contact with his adversaries (and his audience)—are used to maximum effect as he takes on the gang of goons in a fight not so much of physical prowess but of the moral courage of a man whose mind-power far outweighs his physical limitations. At the end of the fight, the hero emerges from the warehouse and goes past his anxious colleagues who are gathered outside, fearing his death. He totters to a tube well, pumps water out of it and bends down to wash his wounds and drink water. There is a raw sensuality to the sequence as he sinks out of sheer exhaustion and the sun reflects off his badge bearing the holy number 786. The point is inescapable: He appears through His messengers. Vijay is the messenger of God. Amitabh now transforms from the hero to the ‘prophet’ hero. Tragedy raises the hero from a person to the ‘Person’ where his ego dissolves and arises anew with the multitude of humanity contained within him.
The fight makes Vijay a philosopher who can think beyond the world of appearances, his material resources and even his physical limitations. It transforms the hero. He had gone into the fight only with the idea of making a strong protest. But in managing to overcome the bullies, he becomes aware of his power and also of his role—he would from now on impersonate justice whenever it fails to deliver. The fight gives the hero an insight into the ways of the world. It recreates him anew. It was important for him to fight even if it meant death. For the hero it is now immaterial whether he lives through a battle or dies fighting it. Even his death would show that he rose to the limits of his capacity. And though reality may not change with his death, he has to die. Death here would be a vindication of his protest that the world that creates ‘war’ also has the capacity to pulverize the individual who tries to bring peace. For his audiences, it was immaterial whether Amitabh lived or died; it was important that he recognized the need to wage the war that would end all wars and went out to do so.
There was a journalistic myth-making in the initial days when Amitabh came into the industry, which said that films, and consequently their heroes, do well when the ‘hero’ dies in the end. It seems that Anand and Namak Haram did this trick for Rajesh Khanna, and Deewar and Sholay did the same for Amitabh Bachchan. The grapevine also had it that Amitabh and Rajesh Khanna would fight over who should die in Namak Haram. But when we look closely at Amitabh’s career profile, we see that he did not need to die in a film for it to be successful. Even in his heyday, characters he essayed lived on in films like Trishul (1978) and Kabhi Kabhie and yet they did well. Death, especially for Amitabh, who remains immune to Rajesh Khanna’s celebration of it in Anand, is neither a step towards resurrection nor a consummation of life. It is plainly tragic and pathetic and shows the cruelty of the world. Death for Amitabh is a mere vindication of his stand, something that sounds like ‘Well, I told you so’. Amitabh Bachchan’s roles never saw glory in death. Our hero is in favour of life and is only willing to give up it up for the life that is beyond the one we see.
Coming back to Deewar, the hero begins a new life after this fight. He is all set for a new philosophical journey but he also enters a different kind of material life. It turns out that the extortionists at the port work for one Sawant (Madan Puri) who has a long-standing animosity with Dawar (Iftekhar). Dawar and Vijay are connected through an unseen chord of Time. Once, when Vijay was a child and worked as a shoeshine boy, Dawar, then starting out on his life of crime, had got the boy to polish his shoes, and at the end of it had thrown a coin at him. The young boy had immediately jumped up and asked Dawar to pick up the coin and hand it to him. Dawar had been impressed with the boy who not only had dignity of labour and self but was also aware that he was engaging in an exchange and not living on charity. Dawar had prophesied, ‘Yeh lambi race ka ghoda hai,’ implying that the boy would rise in life, and even if he started off slow, he would gather speed to beat the others. (Interestingly, this was what Pran is supposed to have said about Amitabh after their first shot together in Zanjeer.)
Dawar enters Vijay’s life once more and, impressed with the way he fights Sawant’s men, offers him a job that soon transforms Vijay into one of the richest persons in the city. Though Vijay recognizes Dawar as the man who threw a coin at him years ago, Dawar does not realize that this tall and tormented young man standing before him is the same child. It is only when Dawar throws a bundle of high-denomination notes as Vijay’s fees that realization dawns. Vijay requests politely but firmly that Dawar pick up the money and hand it to him. ‘Main aaj bhi phenke hue paise nahin uthata (I don’t pick up money thrown at me even now),’ he says tersely. Dawar looks at Vijay with a sense of having found someone he has long searched for, and Vijay finds in Dawar a provider that he lost years ago when his father left home. Only a director like Yash Chopra could have put so much pathos into a perfectly professional exchange between two restrained and distanced impersonal individuals. Vijay looks down at Mumbai from the high-rise building—the world that displaced and insulted him is now falling at his feet. With the money, Vijay goes to a newly constructed building and buys it at an exorbitant premium. When the sellers are bewildered, he says that the building is priceless for him because his mother worked as a labourer there.
Vijay, at one level, is now fully dissolved in the social world that surrounds him, and at another level he has absorbed the world into his person so that his own family becomes impersonal for him. He loves his mother and does everything to make her happy because he feels that she deserves this after long years of toil. But she will have no authority over him. Indeed, when his brother asks him to give up his career as a smuggler, Vijay engages him in a long argument, an argument that formed the political philosophy of a majority of Amitabh’s films and of films in general for a long time to come. He asks his brother whether it is a brother talking to a brother or a law-keeper talking to the lawless. In the long arguments with Ravi, Deewar’s philosophy is dialogically held forth. Ravi pleads that Vijay be integrated into society. Vijay says that he breaks the law in order to expand it so that he can come into its fold. The reason why the outlaw appears so is because he is deprived of social entitlements to contribute towards the remaking of the social order. Society demands things of the outlaw without providing him with the opportunities to fulfil his demands. If the hero has broken the law it is only to return to the mainstream, and Ravi cannot ask him to return to the law only to be once more dispossessed of his rights as a normal human being. Vijay proves that the law displaces and creates its own outlaws. The law-keeper who merely asks people to fall in line is displacing and dispossessing people. The state is the final protector of human life and if its legal provisions cannot protect everyone, this grand institution is belying itself. The intention of law is to give a decent life to everyone and here is a paradox where the law pauperizes some people and allows others like Sawant to continue to extort and violate.
Vijay will not mend his ways. He has taken charge of the world and he cannot go back because for him to return would mean going back to his past. Vijay has risen from the past not to go back into it but to go beyond it. The true pilgrim does not return home. So Vijay now fights his own bonds and his own home to rebuild the earth. This is also Vijay’s last battle with the world, a battle that he does not win. Yash Chopra uses tragedy to engage the hero and his world in a dialectic struggle in which the hero appears to be crushed while the world exults, but in the minds of the audiences quite the contrary is the case. Tragedy is used as a tool to put the hero ahead of his order and to put the human being in a moral advantage over gods.
Contained in the arguments are many discourses and questions that would become major intellectual streams in the near future. Whom is the state intended for? Is it a true democracy where everyone is included or an oligopoly where the interests of some are upheld to the detriment of the livelihoods of many? The film questions the role of the elite to determine whether it can really administer the lives of others. It interprets the accepted morals and virtues of the day as means to subordinate the real world by ignoring the various needs that arise out of different material conditions. It argues that the rules for the rich and the poor cannot be the same because the resources they use and the entitlements they have are so diverse. Yet another argument pertains to the role of the state—it was needed not so much to deliver goods and services as to provide equal opportunities for everyone to make the best out of their lives. This already anticipated the role of the state as a facilitator rather than as a provider of jobs and essential goods and services. The film also argues for the right to livelihood and the right to participate in social life. All of these were soon to become important academic pursuits and in the years that followed, they became important engagements of global politics. In these, we can see a run-up to the present globalization and a change in the nature of the state and the roles of its institutions.
Deewar calls for an expansion in the scope of the state and a plea for extending its order. The political movements of the era, however—those which challenged the state and its central authority—wanted to limit its powers, indeed some like the Naxalite movement advocated a dismantling of the state. These movements challenged the legitimacy of the state because it had failed to deliver what it promised: prices were rising sharply, there was unemployment, political interests were blocking land reforms and the capitalist–labour struggle was taking a new turn with lockouts and strikes. In contrast, Deewar was not ‘anti-state’. In challenging the law, social morality, the entrenched ideology and the elite, it only sought to find a reason for the failure of the state. The reason lay in the state’s unwillingness to reflect upon its rules and codes in order to find out why it failed to deliver. The nature of the hero’s critique was not directed at reducing the powers of the state—rather it appealed to the state to lionize itself further and fulfil its duty.
Ideally, Deewar’s antagonism to the state and its institutions should have aligned Amitabh with the political opposition to the party in power—the Congress. But it was not so. The political opposition criticized the system in order to discredit its incumbent. This was not Deewar’s agenda, nor of most of the angry young man’s other films. Since the hero’s critique was based on impersonal principles and not directed at a particular party, viz., the Congress, the political opposition to the Congress at the time derided Amitabh Bachchan for probing too much into the problematic. They felt that the hero tried to analyse too much, and that he neither gave in to the ideology that opposed the state nor did he show it due respect.
When Mrs Gandhi declared Emergency in 1975, Amitabh supported the Congress and even campaigned for Mrs Gandhi. Some might interpret this gesture to say that Amitabh held beliefs and ideologies that belied the hero he played on-screen, but I am inclined to infer that the polemic of the angry young man was in no way different from the ideology of the Congress. He merely wanted the state’s powers to be intensified—he did not want its curtailment. Since Amitabh’s films made a case for a greater selfreflection on the part of the state and the establishment, he was a rebel, but he was not anti-incumbent. This made many critics condemn Amitabh and his cinema as one that collaborated with the Congress government and the state. Amitabh thus found little favour with the political opposition and none at all with the revolutionary politics of the politically charged youth or the Dalits of the day.
Before Deewar and Zanjeer, a film’s hero would be untainted by the processes of the earth. His ethics were certified by an order of values enshrined in our tradition and in our constitution. But Amitabh was the anti-hero who challenged such ideals and utopias. So he appears with black soot, blood and muck on his face, illustrating the fact that he is engaged in a struggle with the earth. The camera shoots him often at a low angle, telling us that he is a monumental figure, the source of his own life, and one who walks in search of an essence beyond. We used to say that Amitabh’s films were about reality and the films before him, fiction. Deewar in this way was a watershed in Hindi cinema, not in its techniques or canvas but in the way it thought of the world and about how it was constituted. Deewar is as much a film of self-discovery as it is about the discovery of the inner processes of the world. From now on, there would be a world before Deewar and one that emerged after it.
The film is dark and its sets cave-like with sharp lights coming in at an angle. These give Amitabh’s face a drape effect with his hair falling on his forehead, his shirt hanging out and tied in a knot, and some blood on his temples and bruises on his arms accentuating the dramatic. There is a peculiar stillness in his face that is not calm but is on the verge of releasing intense emotions. There is little youth and freshness and more heaviness of wisdom that comes from a prolonged absorption of the insights of an age. The image of the hero is aloof but it betrays his passionate engagement with the world. Deewar established Amitabh in a set of dualities—sentimental attachment and dispassionate detachment, emotion and rationality, optimism and fatalism, and rebellion and a total surrender to higher powers. Tragedy betrays us into believing that we are seeing only one image.
There is something sublime that envelops the film from the beginning to the end. This sublime is the hero’s real battle. This battle is neither with the world nor with the state. This battle is with God. The film begins and ends with the temple. It takes off after a few initial shots with the child Vijay sitting on the steps of the temple and angrily saying that he has nothing to ask of God, and ends with the adult Vijay first scolding God for taking out His anger at him on his mother, and then breathing his last in the temple. The child’s stand is the mature protest of an atheist; the adult Vijay’s complaint is the innocence of a deep-seated believer. We find that the child in him has not died, the mother’s boy in him has not grown up, and even as the most valiant pilgrim he has never emotionally left home. This attachment we see in him is the personal tragedy that is so unbearable and heart-rending. When Ravi shoots him down and he lies dying in his mother’s lap, Vijay attains a sense of self-fulfilment. Ravi is mature enough to do his duty and Vijay has done his work by killing off those who created hell for helpless people like he once was. It is only now that he returns to his lost self. His duty of remaking the world is over. So it is time for him to rest and he tells his mother as he breathes his last, ‘Mother, I am very tired, I am falling off to sleep.’ The tragedy ends, not in despair but in a sense of completion and peace. It becomes a creative tool of the hero, a tool with which conquerors overcome their own limitations.
With Deewar, Yash Chopra established tragedy as a genre in the Hindi film and discovered the tragic hero who would now inhere in the reason of his times. Although the audiences received the film with open arms, Deewar produced nervousness within the world of cinema. The tragic hero had a problem: he could become so absorbed in his own contemplation that he might become a law unto himself. Also, there was every possibility that the hero’s desire for order and perfection would slowly descend into conservatism and an insistence on conformism. Indeed, a number of film-makers who worked with Amitabh after 2000 addressed this subtext of conservatism that they read in his epoch-making roles. In the silence and the solitude of his life, the hero could degenerate into a soliloquy and not engage in dialogue. For instance, in Kabhi Kabhie, he refuses to marry the woman he loves because her parents have arranged her marriage to someone else and he does not wish to interfere with her parents’ decision. The hero then withdraws totally into himself and silences the poet within him that was in love with the woman. Kabhi Kabhie portrays this withdrawal of the hero in an almost intimidating manner. The hero displays a similar trait in Trishul, where he and his mother have been abandoned by his father who gives in to an ambitious and scheming mother. The hero scorns affections and love because he looks upon these things as weaknesses, as emotions found only in books, not in real life. In the only line he is given to sing in the film, he says, Kitabon mein chhapte hain chahat ke kisse, haqeeqat ki duniya mein chahat nahin hai (Love exists only in books, not in real life). He cocoons himself in silence and solitude where he convinces himself that he only seeks fame and success. In both these cases, Yash Chopra, through the heroine of the film, expresses a deep concern about the self-inflicted seclusion of the hero.
Amitabh’s detractors in later days pointed out that the hero put his self in place of institutions and in this became a dictator and fascist. It was not as if Prakash Mehra, Yash Chopra and other directors were not aware of this danger. They realized that the tragedy had to be dissolved so that the world could be saved from its burden of sorrow and the hero rescued from his solitary confinement and brought into the world of humans. Films henceforth attempted to dilute the hero’s anger and anguish.
Extracted from Amitabh: The Making of a Superstar.